I’m a little late to this party, I’ll admit. “Man of Steel” came out a week and a half ago, which is ages during a summer movie season in which there’s an “event” movie every Friday and the buzz often peaks and fades in a matter of days. But I do still want to offer some thoughts on this.

My 30-second review: The cast, for the most part, was awesome. Special props to Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent, Michael Shannon as General Zod and Russell Crowe as Jor-El. I loved Zack Snyder’s direction; here’s a director who works outside of the “dark” aesthetic that’s depressingly common these days in blockbusters but also doesn’t subject us to J.J. Abrams-style lens flare overload. And Hans Zimmer’s score was, predictably, excellent. The guy was born to write music for superhero movies.

The movie does, however, have a couple flaws: Its script and story (not necessarily the same thing) from David Goyer and Christopher Nolan, the two brains behind Nolan’s recently concluded Batman trilogy. Don’t get me wrong; I love “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight.” I think Nolan’s take on Batman showed everyone the great heights genre films (i.e. traditionally flimsy stuff like sci-fi, horror, fantasy, comic adaptations, etc.) can reach when you give the material to filmmakers who have real creative talent. That said, “Man of Steel” shows that Nolan and Goyer were wrong for Superman, and it’s really rather obvious in hindsight why.

The great (or terrible, depending on your point of view) thing Nolan and his team did with his Batman movies was strip Batman of pretty much all of his comic book iconography to create as close to a realistic character as they could. And that works for Batman: He’s more or less an ordinary man, and so we got to see what happens when you put a regular, deeply-troubled person in a costume and turn him loose to fight crime.

The problem with utilizing this approach, as Nolan and Goyer more or less did in “Man of Steel,” is that Superman is – by definition – not ordinary. (It’s in his name, for crying out loud.) By trying to strip Superman of everything that makes him super, Nolan and Goyer weren’t left with all that much, and what they were left with was pretty joyless and grim. Joyless and grim works for Batman; it doesn’t work for Superman.

A brief digression here: A fair amount of what I’ve said to this point has been informed by people who’ve been writing about movies and comics for a lot longer than I have, and who do it better than I do. So go check them out and report back.

Here’s what I have to add to what those guys said: There’s no particular reason the creative team behind “Man of Steel” couldn’t have offered up a version of Superman that incorporated much more of the character’s innate, earnest desire to do good. How do I know? Because Marvel already did it with “Captain America: The First Avenger.”

Instead of finding some reason to turn Captain America into yet another brooding hero, that movie played the character completely unironically, focusing on how his innate good nature and desire to help was thwarted because nobody would give him a chance. (Sam Raimi did the same thing with the first run of Spider-Man movies.) Yes it was basically an old-school war epic that happened to feature a guy with superpowers, but the movie succeeded on its own terms and brought Captain America into the modern movie era. Why not take the same approach to Superman and embrace what makes him so iconic instead of rejecting it?

In a print piece that ran in The Sun the week “Man of Steel” opened (read it here), I wrote that ” … movie audiences are starting to get a little tired of the dark, and history suggests Superman is the one to lead the way into the light.” Sadly, it appears that I was wrong. That doesn’t bother so much as the fact that as long as movie studios insist on following Batman’s example, we’ll continue to get superheroes who just aren’t that fun to watch.

About This Blog

Rob Ryan joined The Gainesville Sun in 2010 after graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Though he graduated with a degree in journalism, he also studied film and is a longtime cinephile. Rob now spends his days soaking up all things cinema and his nights on the copy desk. His favorite movies are the original Star Wars trilogy.